A godly response to evil

A Passionist priest - Fr. Daniel Senior, CP - recently shared these thoughts:

Right after the terrible days of September 11 I came across a newsletter sent out by an Orthodox Jewish Rabbi in New York to his followers.  The words stay with me and I would like to share a paragraph with you now:

Dear Friends,

What is the remedy to Wanton Hatred? Our rabbi of righteous memory answered this many times, with clarity and certitude: Wanton Love. Raw, cold-blooded, fanatical, baseless, relentless hatred can be matched and combated only with pure, undiscriminating, uninhibited, unyielding, baseless, unsolicited love and acts of kindness.

But we need not just plain love. We need love that costs us. Love that we get nothing back for.  There are people in the world that are committed to sowing their hatred. We need to be willing to lose sleep, to suffer losses, to be uncomfortable, to sacrifice our pleasures, in order to help another human being -- with at least the precision, determination and passion that Evil's compatriots employ to fulfill their mission of hate.

Every one of us can make a difference. Our Rebbe would always quote the Maimonidean adage: Each person should see himself as though the entire world is on a delicate balance and with one deed he or she can tip the scales. Only a few handfuls of evil people can seem to turn our world upside down. Let us not underestimate the power of each of us to turn it upright again.

Every good act, every expression of kindness and love, will be a thousand antibodies to neutralize the viruses put in place by the forces of evil. In response to darkness, we will fill the earth with light. To defeat evil we will saturate our globe with good.

And when we do our part G-d will surely do His part to protect us and transform our world to the one we all hope and yearn for, one that will be filled with His glory, like the waters fill the ocean.

                                                                                    Amen.

             The cross, ultimately, is God’s way of reminding us that the force of God’s love is more powerful than any force of evil or hatred or death.  That is a message of hope that is the foundation of the gospel of Jesus Christ and that is the message we Passionists must strive to proclaim through the works of our ministry. 

            There is even something more…  The cross of Jesus did not end in lingering death but in the power of resurrection.  If we contemplate reality through the lens of the cross then we must also see our lives and our destiny in the light of the resurrection.  The conviction of resurrection is what gives hope and meaning to the cross of Christ.  We are Passionists but we are also people of the resurrection.

            In his beautiful homily at this year’s Easter Vigil in St. Peters, Pope Benedict XVI spoke of the resurrection in eloquent terms worth remembering.  He noted that the reality of the resurrection brings an entirely new level of life and being to our universe.  He compared it to a mutation in evolution.  “…Christ’s Resurrection, he noted,…is the greatest “mutation”, absolutely the most crucial leap into a totally new dimension that there has ever been in the long history of life and its  development; a leap into a completely new order that concerns us, and the concerns the whole of history.”  The pope went on, “At the Last Supper Jesus anticipated death and transformed it into self-giving.  His existential communion with God was concretely an existential communion with God’s love, and this love is the real power against death, it is stronger than death.  The Resurrection was like an explosion of light, an explosion of love…which ushered in a new dimension of being, a new dimension of life in which, in a transformed way, matter too was integrated and through which a new world emerges.”

            This conviction that the cross is the unimpeachable sign of God’s love for the world, that it leads to an explosion of light and love that has changed our destiny and our world forever, is something that we should not only preach as an essential part of our message of the cross, but is something we need to take to heart ourselves at this moment in our Passionist history.  Confidence in God’s love for us.  Confidence that we are people of the resurrection—viewing the future in this way should ultimately dissolve our anxiety and enable us to plan and decide and build with serenity.  We are not dead—we are alive.  The Passionists are alive.  Saint Paul of the Cross province is alive.  And God is with us.  This is not hokum or whistling in the dark.  It is the deepest conviction of our Christian faith on which we have wagered everything. Whatever should befall us.  Whatever circumstances we may have to face—we will not die but live because of the Crucified Christ who gave his life for us and abides with us still.

                                                           

                                                                        Donald Senior, C.P.